Month: August 2019

Christmas Evil (1980)

CHRISTMAS EVIL (1980)
aka You Better Watch Out

Article 3672 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-19-2011
Posting Date: 9-3-2011
Directed by Lewis Jackson
Featuring Brandon Maggart, Jeffrey DeMunn, Dianne Hull
Country: USA
What it is: Christmas psycho movie

After suffering a traumatic childhood experience involving his father in Santa Claus outfit, a disturbed toy factory worker fixates on Santa Claus in an unhealthy way. When Christmas cynicism pushes him over the edge, he takes on the role one Christmas eve to reward the good boys and girls… and to murder the cynics.

With only a 4.4 rating on IMDB, this entry in the “killer Santa” subgenre is not very well respected. But I believe anyone who goes into this one with the expectation of seeing a full-blown slasher film will walk away very disappointed. Rather than having some mindless killer knocking off people one by one, this one attempts to paint a portrait of a disturbed man and his obsessions while exploring some of the slightly creepy undercurrents of the Santa legend itself. He doesn’t don the Santa suit until the second half of the movie, but where many people find the first half dull, I was actually fascinated by seeing the details of his obsession, and I think the first half has the most suspenseful scene (where he covers himself with mud to hide himself while spying on one young boy). It looked initially to me that it was going to go downhill once he was in the suit; his first scene has him flashing a knife in a self-consciously “scary” way, and this made me fear that the main character was going to lose all of his dimension. However, there are some real surprises during this half, largely because the main character is such a loose cannon we’re not sure what he’s going to do in certain situations. There are some flaws, of course. The police investigation is extraordinarily lame; despite the fact that they have a clear description of the killer’s distinctive van and the fact that he leaves his fingerprints all over creation, they decide to arrest every one they find in a Santa suit on Christmas Day. And though the movie does add a bit of a homage to the Universal Frankenstein movies by having Santa chased around by villagers bearing torches, it seems really forced because there is simply no logical reason why these people would even have torches handy to begin with. The ending of the movie is very unexpected, but quite interesting in its way. All in all, I quite liked this one.

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Damnation Alley (1977)

DAMNATION ALLEY (1977)
Article 3671 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-18-2011
Posting Date: 9-2-2011
Directed by Jack Smight
Featuring Jan-Michael Vincent, George Peppard, Dominique Sanda
Country: USA
What it is: After-the-apocalypse road movie

It’s after the apocalypse. A group of survivors from a military installation cross the country in a special tank-like vehicle to see if there are survivors in Albany.

I saw this movie years ago, and I could only remember two things about it; one was the cool three-tire arrangement on the large motor vehicle, and the other was the color orange. Watching it again, I can see why; there’s something in the general tone of this movie that is so muted and suspenseless that even the apocalypse at the beginning of the movie comes across as only mildly interesting. The movie is based on a novel by Roger Zelazny, and I certainly hope the source novel is more inventive than this movie is; I found the movie singularly lacking in surprises. The movie does struggle out of the doldrums a little for the killer cockroach scene, and the special sky effects are pretty to look at. Probably the thing I will most remember from this viewing is that the movie also features Jackie Earle Haley, who would go on to give an excellent performance as Rorschach in THE WATCHMEN. Outside of that, this is a fairly tired and tiresome outing.

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Who’s Guilty? (1945)

WHO’S GUILTY? (1945)
Serial

Article 3670 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-17-2011
Posting Date: 9-1-2011
Directed by Howard Bretherton and Wallace Grissell
Featuring Robert Kent, Amelita Ward, Tim Ryan
Country: USA
What it is: Whodunit serial

When a rich businessman is murdered in a car accident, an investigator tries to sort out the responsible party from among the businessman’s prospective heirs.

A little while ago I thought I was done with serials, but such is not the case, it looks like; this one popped up in a different source, so here I am covering it. This one, rather than being the usual action type of serial, is a whodunit, sort of like an “old dark house” serial. However, no self-respecting serial would spend its whole running time in one place, so as soon as possible, people are slipping out of the house and going to places like Mexico so that the investigator can follow them and get into cliffhangers. From a story perspective, most of the middle episodes can be safely skipped. As for the mystery itself, I’ll just say that I noticed one detail in the opening scene that gave me the clue to figure out what was really going on, and by the final episode, I knew I was correct. Overall, the serial is rather humdrum, and doesn’t really make good use of the novelty of it being a mystery serial. At least one good thing I can say about it is that the comic relief character isn’t annoying; on the down side, he’s not particularly funny either.

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The Ghastly Ones (1968)

THE GHASTLY ONES (1968)
Article 3669 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-16-2011
Posting Date: 8-31-2011
Directed by Andy Milligan
Featuring Veronica Radburn, Maggie Rogers, Hal Borske
Country: USA
What it is: Milligan takes on the “old dark house” genre

Three women and their husbands stand to inherit their father’s fortune if they stay for three days in his mansion. But someone is killing off the heirs in gruesome fashion…

How ghastly are they? Well, to begin with, the last few Andy Milligan movies I’ve seen I felt were redeemed somewhat by the fact that there were some good actors in the mix. They may still be there in this one, but between the wretched script (this is one of those movies where you can safely dismiss ninety percent of the dialogue as chatter), the horrible sound, the hyperactive and jerky camerawork, the awful costumes, the terrible makeup, etc., etc…. well, let’s just say that I really wonder if the movie turned out just as Andy Milligan was hoping it would. If he was actually intending to leave me with a headache and feeling rather nauseated (and not in the “ooooh, that’s really gross!” way, but in the “I think I ate something bad…” way), then he was successful. As far as I can tell, this is the goriest of his movies I’ve seen to date, though it’s hard to tell with the camera careening over all creation during the gore sequences. About the best thing I can say about this one is that, once you filter out the chatter, it’s relatively coherent (for an Andy Milligan film); I wasn’t left scratching my head at the end. Milligan would remake the film a decade later as LEGACY OF HORROR, and I’ll no doubt see that one before it’s all over.

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